The US and UK governments have indicated there will be no softening of their stances on Iran and Syria despite calls for their help to stabilise Iraq. President Bush said Iran must halt its nuclear activities and Syria stay out of Lebanon before talks could begin. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair urged Tehran to "stop supporting terrorism" in the region or face isolation. Engaging Iraq's neighbours is one of the proposals being considered as part of a re-think of US strategy in Iraq. In a major foreign policy speech in London, Mr Blair put the blame for the violence in Iraq squarely on outside forces. It was therefore important to have a strategy for the whole Middle East region which could include co-operation with Iran and Syria, but only if the two countries changed their ways, he said. ... http://news.bbc.co.uk

Dutch archeologists have discovered an estimated 200 silver Roman coins, several jewels, an armband and a ring hidden in a clay pot, the city overseeing the dig said Monday. The city of Cuijk, near the Maas river, 80 miles southeast of Amsterdam, said archeologists found the cache while excavating in an area where new housing is to be built. So far, most of the treasure in the pot has only been examined with x-rays. The first coin to be removed and cleaned bears the emblem of the eccentric Roman emperor Elagabalus, who reigned from 218-222 A.D., the city said. "During the uncovering of the pot, it became apparent that it was placed precisely at the spot where a bolt of lighting struck," a statement by the city said. "Further study will have to determine whether … the pot could have been buried as an offering, or if the inhabitants by chance had left these valuables hidden in this spot for fear of theft." ...http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2650520

The Bush administration said Monday that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have no right to challenge their detentions in civilian courts and that lawsuits by hundreds of detainees should be dismissed.In court documents filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Justice Department defended the military's authority to arrest people overseas and detain them indefinitely without access to courts.It's the first time that argument has been spelled out since President Bush signed a law last month setting up military commissions for the thousands of foreigners being held in U.S. prisons abroad.Bush hailed the law as a crucial tool in the war on terrorism and said it would allow prosecution of several high-level terror suspects.Human rights groups and attorneys for the detainees say the law is unconstitutional. Prisoners normally have the right to challenge their imprisonment....http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/13/ap/national/mainD8LCFF4G1.shtml

NASA is running out of options for fixing a failed Mars probe that has been snapping detailed pictures of the red planet for a decade, officials said on Monday.Mars Global Surveyor is the oldest of five NASA robotic probes checking the planet for signs that Mars once had water, which many scientists believe to be the key to learning if life ever took root there. Global Surveyor, which has found evidence of ancient channels and gullies that likely were carved by flowing water, stopped working on November 2 after it developed a motor problem while trying to move one of its power-generating solar panels. After two days of silence, ground control teams received a signal that the spacecraft had put itself into an emergency standby mode. There was no information about what had gone wrong. Since then, the mission operations team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has run through nearly all its backup plans to try to contact the probe. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2650645

British Prime Minister Tony Blair challenged Iran and Syria on Monday to help stabilize Iraq or face isolation as Washington and London review their strategy in Iraq.President Bush met Monday in Washington with a commission studying the war and said conditions in Iraq, not politics, would dictate troop levels there. (Full story. ) Blair said a "whole" Middle East strategy that embraced the region's problems was needed to stem violence in Iraq and suggested a "new partnership" was possible with Syria and Iran.But Blair -- accused by critics of going soft on Syria and Iran -- said Britain's policy was unchanged. Both countries must renounce support for terrorism, and in Iran's case, its nuclear ambitions....http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/11/13/uk.blair.speech.reut/index.html?eref=rss_world

Ben Bangs pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket on which he has neatly listed in pencil how much he has paid in property taxes in each of the past several years. Like everything else, the amount has gone up steadily each year, but it spiked 38 percent in the past year, driven by soaring property values even in his little town of 450. "People are being forced to sell," Bangs said. "They can't afford to live comfortably and pay their taxes, too. They don't want to sell it. We've struggled to hold on to it." Bangs, his neighbors and homeowners in dozens of other Vermont towns have reached a breaking point, demanding the repeal of a statewide property tax enacted nearly a decade ago. The state adopted the tax in 1997 under pressure from the Vermont Supreme Court to eliminate unfairness in the way schools are funded. But homeowners complain that the law has led to another kind of unfairness: Their tax bills keep going up and up. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2649709